Every year The Orlando Museum of Art hosts the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art. This includes a display of artwork from local Florida artists, some emerging and others well-established.
2016 Florida Prize Winner: Noelle Mason
Noelle Mason won the 2016 Florida Prize for her artwork based on the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. She recreated pages from one of the killer’s diary by hand-stitching the content on dozens of vintage white handkerchiefs.
2017 Florida Prize Participants
2017 is the fourth year for the Florida Prize. The artists included art:
Domingo Castillo
During Art Basel Miami, Castillo plastered telephone poles with advertisements for a missing cat. However, the posters actually took you to an off-show space displaying local Miami talent.
William Cordova
Cordova has lived and worked in three very different cities: New York, Miami, and Lima, Peru. These experiences have directed his art to focus on displacement and the problems that arise, such as linguistic and cultural differences.
Carl Juste
Conflict-zone journalist Carl Juste has covered conflict and daily life in places including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. At this year’s Florida Prize exhibition, Juste presents photographs from Haiti and Miami’s Little Haiti.
Ralph Provisero
Using industrial material such as iron and steel, Provisero’s scultpures have been on display in museums and galleries in the US and Europe. On exhibit for the Florida Prize is his piece, “Pay to Pray”, a Catholic votive candle stand, but instead of candles, inside of the individual holders are oversized brass bullets.
Coco Fusco
Cuban-American Coco Fusco is not only an interdisciplinary artist, but also a writer. These things go hand-in-hand in much of her work as she presents narratives and ideas through a variety of interwoven mediums.
Mark Gerstein
Having started his career in Hollywood, Gerstein’s experimental filmmaking moves beyond the film festival and into the art gallery.
Chase Westfall
Westfall’s piece in this year’s Florida Prize competition, represents the Syrian Crisis. According to the Museum’s Instagram account, the piece is “a replica of a fence in the town Raqqa, which has been an ISIS stronghold for years. The iron fence’s decorative motifs reflect patterns and designs that are typical of Islamic architectural ornament. The fence, which encloses the town square, is not artistically significant, but it must have been considered an attractive civic feature. In 2014 the fence began to appear in news clips and ISIS propaganda as the setting for a series of horrific atrocities.”
Dana Hargrove
Through art, the artist questions, “the ties that surround our daily lives whether cultural, political, religious or social.” Hargrove’s main concern: “if there is a gap between the system and the individual, with the system larger than the human, does it encourage our sophisticated removal into abstraction and our ease with the representation rather than the reality?”
Lisa Iglesias
According to her website, Iglesias’ “work explores the expansive histories and potentials of drawing and takes into consideration the translation of patterns, images and gestures across mediums.”
Aramis Gutierrez
Gutierrez has a somewhat traditional approach to making art with not-so-traditional themes. Gutierrez presents his work “Untitled (Gold Eagle)” at the 2017 Orlando Museum of Art Florida Prize.
